I would like to share with you information about this important feature. First of all my respects for TheXCartStore and Qualiteam who offer trial versions to install on your own test servers and give a try.

Normally we should know many things about these solutions before buying. Some of them are suppling trials versions which is great. Speed and Accuracy are very important. Also what fields from DB are used to provide results. Personally I would like to get results querying Products, Categories, Manufacturers, Static Pages. For Products - product title, product description, options, variants, extra fields. Customizing searching if there are any spelling errors.

After testing Predictive Search and Smasher I cannot tell for sure what feeds the results. Both show results based on the first letter of the product name. If you search for "Binary Mom" pressing Bin you will get "Binary Mom". But if you search for Mom, Binary Mom won't appearing which is not correct. There are very important issues. Predictive Search is slow mostly because the script loads the page many times, letter by letter.

Ajax Dynamic Search MK2 is providing fast results, no problem as I found in product title. Again I don't know what are the fields which feed the results. As I see for products it is only the products title. What happens if you don't know the product title and try something from product description, or a product option?

Both Ajax Dynamic Search and Smasher do not offer a trial version. In my opinion is not a good approach for new customers. Just showing a demo is not a strong argument to buy.

CloudSearch is great, fast, excellent results. Comparing with the other this could be expensive and you have to pay monthly for it. It is limited to only 50000 products in Gold version.

So, which one is the best? Any other PRO and CONS about these products? Please feel free to mention other solutions too!

P.S. I will open a new thread soon about 3rd party developers. I spent lot of time to analyze many solutions and I would like to share with you what I grabbed. There are things I like and things I don't.

It is free, fast, great results. Why we cannot have for XC a true, acceptable as price, instant search solution?

I could provide one more but this one is a paid shopping cart, it is working great too. Both these solutions are working fast, great accuracy, and free for their users. I do not want something for free, but why in 2012 we cannot have such of solutions? Shall I say two words about a true filtering missing module? Sometimes I blame myself being so loyal to XC

Have you taken a look at the Smasher one? It's a very good search engine in terms of the options it allows in the backend in having control. It's just short on the filters. They had told me that they would be willing to add the rest of the functionality such as the quick search, filters, and export, but would be around $600 to do so. Just didn't know if it was worth it. But honestly if there isn't any other option it may be something that I might have to seriously think about.

Yeap, I'm still testing all mentioned modules. What I would like to get are trial versions to install on my localhost especially for Smasher and AJAX Dynamic Search. That's why I will contact those developers who do not offer trials hopping to get trail for evaluations.

Smasher and Predictive Search have problems with quick search. It is not OK to see in product title a phrase and the software to look for first letter of the title, then the second one. Till now for XC, CloudSearch seems to provide the results I would like to get. The only problem I see it is expensive and paid per month. And Prestashop seems to do a good job for quick search too. If someone will do such of module like Presta I will buy it immediately.

About a price of 600 bucks I won't say anything. It is your money and decision.

If you give me a week I shall wrap up the remaining functionality, which is paginated results and ability to easily style the thumbnails.

This code uses xcarts search.php. So all fields for products that are returned on this script are available to the search module. However, the search modules expects a JSON format so only the required fields from search.php are passed back to the search results for efficiency. Hope this makes sense.

Also the link url needs to be converted in a clean url to the expanded page.